I’m taking a break from reporting on my preparations for my Teachers for Global Classrooms trip to Indonesia to bring you up to date on activities in my STEAM it Up and Chemistry classes, so that I can maintain some semblance of chronologic continuity.

Ice dyeing creates intense, random colors.

Once we finished our unit on steampunk sculpture and cosplay costume creation, we began ramping up for the concluding section of our dyeing cloth lab in the STEAM it Up class. To get the students back in the mood, I introduced them to tie-dye and all of its STEAM applications. I’ve reported on how to do tie-dye in previous posts, so I won’t describe what we did again here. We did add a new wrinkle to the process by trying out a different type of dyeing using ice to randomize the colors. This is called ice dyeing, and you can find many beautiful examples online. The colors tend to be much more intense (because the dye powder is less diluted by the ice).

Here’s how to do it:

My STEAM it Up students adding tie-dye powder over the ice layer. The T-shirts and other cloth items are scrunched up on a tray under the ice.

First, you find a tray or grate or sieve of some kind that can fit inside a waterproof container, such as a plastic storage box. The grate must have holes to let water through and be raised a few inches above the bottom of the container so that the cloth won’t be sitting in the melted ice water.

Second, you need white or near-white cloth such as T-shirts or aprons or socks. These need to be pre-soaked in washing soda (sodium carbonate) dissolved in warm water. I use about a cup (250 mL) of washing soda to a sink full of warm water. Soak the cloth for at least 15 minutes, then wring out most of the water so that the cloth is wet but not dripping The cloth pieces or T-shirts then need to be wadded or scrunched up randomly and laid in the tray next to each other tightly enough so that they will remain somewhat folded up.

The ice with a completed layer of dye powder. I demonstrated the process at the bottom with a spectrum of colors (and two shirts underneath). Students die the middle and top. Where complimentary colors are mixed, as in the top right, the results were more muddy. Yellow needs to be given more room since any other color will mix in and darken it.

Third, ice or snow is layered on top of the cloth or shirts. We simply raided the faculty lounge refrigerator’s icemaker and poured the ice on top of the cloth. It needs to make a fairly complete and even layer with no holes. We did this in May or we would have gone outside and gathered snow for a finer, more complete layer.

Fourth, tie-dye powder (we used Procion MX dye powder ordered from Dharma Trading Company) is spooned onto the ice or snow. This will use a lot of dye powder, so go sparingly and try to make a rainbow or spectrum pattern, with analogous colors next to each other instead of complimentary colors. Otherwise, the opposite colors will mix and you’ll get muddy results. There is some good color theory that can be taught here.

To keep the T-shirts from sitting in the muddy melt water, the tray they are sitting in must be raised out of the water. I placed this tray on top of some funnels I use for tie dyeing. This is what the shirts look like after the ice melts. The shirts must sit for 24 hours with a lid on the container before rinsing. By scrunching up the cloth, and by the mixing of colors as the ice or snow melts, the final shirts have bright, random colors.

Finally, put a cover on the container and let it sit overnight undisturbed. It must be airproof, as the dyes need wet cloth and about 24 hours to set in. The colors will mix in the melt water to make a dark olive or brown color that can be saved for other dyeing. The shirts are then rinsed out in a sink with running cool water until no more color rinses out of them. They can then be washed with non-bleach detergent on gentle cycle and dried normally.

Ice dyed shirts.

Here is a photo of the results. Since some of my students forgot to bring their own T-shirts, I brought in all the old T-shirts I could find. Some of them had paint on them or were buried at the bottom of my drawer and hadn’t been worn in years. Now they have a new lease on life and are my favorite tie-dye shirts. Over the years, I’ve built up quite a collection, but these have the most intense colors.

Here I am wearing my favorite ice dyed shirt. Notice how bright the colors are, but it does use up a lot of dye powder.

As part of my unit on the history of chemistry, I wanted my students to experience an ancient art. I have written before that, in my opinion, there were three major threads that led to modern chemistry: Greek Matter theories (more on that in my next post), Alchemy, and Artisans. Some of the art forms and technologies invented during Roman and Medieval times are still practiced today in essentially the same fashion, such as stained and blown glass, ceramics, sword making and blacksmithing, jewelry, weaving and fabric dyeing, and some types of metallurgy.

Hoop Dancer, a bronze statue on display at Adonis Bronze

We have some newer tools and a better understanding of how matter works, but in many cases the old techniques haven’t changed much. For example, a glass blower from the Middle Ages would have no problem working in a modern workshop. We have better heating sources for the glory hole and annealing oven, can use a blowtorch to keep areas hot, and have substituted wet newsprint for the smelly leather they used to use. But that’s about all that’s changed.

Blacksmith statue at Adonis Bronze, made with the lost wax technique.

I did some searching and found there were several workshops in our area that do bronze casting using the lost wax technique known from antiquity, with a few modern additions. I arranged for my chemistry and 3D modeling students to tour Adonis Bronze in Alpine on Friday, Nov. 7, 2014.

Sketches of horses by Leonarda Da Vinci in preparation for creating the bronze horse.

Students were prepared by discussing how the lost wax technique works and giving examples, such as Leonardo Da Vinci’s huge bronze horse for the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, that was never finished. He had devised a method for making the horse in a single bronze pour, and he drew extensive sketches. He even made a full-scale clay model of the horse which stood 24 feet high. He was collecting the bronze for it when war broke out; the French invaded northern Italy and attacked Milan in 1499. The Duke was forced to melt the collected bronze down into cannons, but the French still won. They used the clay horse model for target practice.

Da Vinci’s sketch for how he would pour the bronze.

A 1977 National Geographic article on Da Vinci included sketches of the lost horse, and a retired American airline pilot named Charles Dent dedicated his art collection to the project. A foundation was created and an artist named Nina Akamu was hired. She used Da Vinci’s original sketches to create a new plan for the horse. Billionaire Frederik Meijer helped to fund the project, and two full-sized horses were cast in 1999, 500 years after the original was supposed to be done. One is at an outdoor museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan and the other stands outside the racetrack in Milan. A smaller scale version is located in Allentown, PA, the home of Charles Dent.

Completed horse statue in Grand Rapids, MI

We carpooled up to the foundry and began in their main exhibit hall. We divided up into groups, and I handed out cameras to each group so we could record everything and eventually make a video.

Adonis Bronze foundry in Alpine, Utah

The modern version of the lost wax technique has quite a few steps. First, an original model is built out of oil-based clay over the top of an armature, or wire frame. For larger sculptures, a smaller model is created then scanned digitally into 3D. It is scaled up on the computer, then a physical version is cut out of foam using a 3D milling machine.

Yours Truly being attacked by a dragon. It was modeled in 3D on a computer and cut out of foam with a milling machine at Adonis Bronze

Sometimes the foam model is all that is needed. For example, at last summer’s Fantasy Con in Salt Lake City, a 30-foot tall dragon was built out of foam pieces and assembled and painted. The dragon was designed and cut here at Adonis Bronze. They also made large swords and shields and other display pieces, some of which were in the hallways here.

Foam milling machine used to cut the pieces for the dragon.

Once the original model is done, it is coated in a silicon rubber gel to make a negative mold. That gel, colored blue, is coated in plaster to reinforce it.

Clay sculptures used as original molds for the bronze statues.

A reddish-brown colored wax is melted and kept bubbling in vats. It is scooped up with metal pitchers and poured carefully into the silicon mold to coat the inside and make a thin layer. The final bronze statues are usually not solid, as that would take too much bronze. They are usually less than ½ inch thick.

The flexible silicon is then pulled away from the wax positive. Any imperfections are fixed and wax cups and sprues (spouts or channels) are added to direct the flow of the bronze to all parts of the mold. The silicon molds are stored for future use in case extra copies of the statue are needed.

Clay model for Wingless Victory statue.

To create another negative mold that will hold the hot bronze, the wax positive is dipped into a thin ceramic slurry which coats the outside and inside of the hollow pieces. The slurry-coated wax is then dipped in sand. The sand pot has air blown up through it so that the ceramic slurry can be quickly inserted and coated.

Silicon rubber mold for Wingless Victory

It’s kind of like making a Balboa ice cream bar at Balboa Beach in southern California. There, a chocolate or vanilla ice cream bar (like the wax positive) is dipped in a chocolate coating, then immediately dipped into nuts or sprinkles while the chocolate is still liquid. Here, the wet slurry is dipped into sand, then dipped into liquid cement and allowed to dry. This ceramic/cement negative mold is hard enough to withstand the hot bronze without cracking. Vents are also added so that air can escape as the bronze is poured in.

Vats of melted wax ready to pour into silicon molds.

The molds are placing upside down in an oven and heated to melt out the wax, which is collected and re-used. This leaves a hollow area for the bronze. The molds are then placed into a kiln and heated to the temperature of the molten bronze, about 2100 ° F (1200 ° C). The bronze is melted in a blast furnace inside a balanced crucible. The bronze casters wear thermally insulated suits and carefully pour the bronze into the heated ceramic/cement molds.

Pouring hot wax into the silicon rubber mold.

Once the bronze and molds cool, the mold is broken off and the bronze pieces are “chased” – the cups and sprues are cut off along with any extra bronze that might have leaked around the edges of the mold.

Removing the silicon rubber from the wax positive.

If the statue is large and made from separate pieces, the pieces are then assembled together using welding torches and metal staples. Sandblasters are used to smooth the seams and staples so the surface appears continuous.

Wax mold after chasing, with the halves of the mold combined and cup and sprues (distribution channels) added.

To get the right finish and colors in the bronze, the statue is sent to a room where chemicals (acids, bases, finishes, etc.) are added to create a desired color. Sometimes the color is created by heat treating – the bronze, which is an alloy of copper and tin, will take on a range of purple and red hues simply by heating areas to just the right temperature with a blow torch. The final coloration is called a patina. The surface is then waxed to preserve it from oxidizing.

Coating the wax with a ceramic slurry to make a negative mold.

The final step is to add a base, usually of wood or marble, then prepare the statue for shipping and display.

Coating the slurry in sand. Air is blown up through the sand to make it easier to coat the slurry quickly.

It was a fascinating tour. I asked many questions, and got some great things on tape. They were not doing a bronze pour today, so at some point I need to get back to videotape that. They were nice enough to give me a packet of photos showing a statue of a woman going through the entire process. I scanned the photos and created a Powerpoint slideshow, which I am linking to here: Adonis Bronze slideshow-s

Cement-sand-clay slurry casts with wax inside. Notice the sprues that distribute the bronze once the wax is melted out.

I am amazed at how many of these steps haven’t really changed from Da Vinci’s time (or earlier – some examples have been found in Israel that date to 3700 BCE). He did not have silicon rubber to make the negative mold from the clay, and so a direct technique was used. A core of clay was dipped in wax and the wax carved into a final shape.

Melting the wax out of the mold. This is the “lost wax” step. It leaves a hollow for the bronze to fill.

Sprues were added and the whole thing buried in a compacted sand pit with drains in the bottom. The wax was melted out by heating the sand from the sides or underneath, leaving a clay core supported by rods and a hollow negative space surrounded by hot sand. The bronze was then poured in, allowed to cool, and the whole statue dug out and filed and polished to its final shape. How Da Vinci would have accomplished this with a 24-foot high horse is beyond me.

Pouring the molten bronze into the pre-heated ceramic/cement molds.

At some point I hope to find a way to duplicate this process on a small scale using pewter or another alloy with a low melting point. I know small heated crucibles are available to melt pewter. Now all we need is a way to re-create the lost wax technique to make the molds.

Assembly of the Wingless Victory statue. Large pieces are welded and stapled together, then smoothed and sandblasted to remove seams.

Perhaps we can carve the sculptures out of wax and coat them with plaster-of-Paris, then melt out the wax. We would have to be careful to not dehydrate the plaster. Or perhaps the molds could be made with wet clay and fired, then filled with metal. It would be a challenging project. If anyone has done something like this, please let me know.

Acids, bases, metal salts, and heat are used to create different colored patinas on the surface.

Wingless Victory on display in the showroom at Adonis Bronze

Feather dancers, a statue on display in the showroom of Adonis Bronze.

An elk and Mark Twain. Notice the differences in the patina colors on the elk.

Other clay statues. They are built around a wire and metal rod armature.

Examples of marbled paper made with dilute oil paints floated on water.

As part of the STEM-Arts Alliance project I’ve undertaken at Walden School of Liberal Arts, I have been trying out different ways to integrate art and history into STEM subjects, such as teaching about the history of chemistry and the science behind the fine arts.

Making marbled paper

I was sent a lesson activity from Flinn Scientific a year ago on how to make marbled paper, the fancy designed paper you see on the end pages of nicely bound books. The activity seemed fun and easy to do, so I saved it. Now, as part of our project, I’ve dusted it off and tried it out twice in this school year. The first time was at Timp Lodge as a second activity to do while making tie-dye shirts (see my last post). The second time was part of a Science and Art class I did for our Intersession period, which is a two-week specialty course we do between third and fourth terms in March.

Laying paper onto the oil paint layer.

To do this, you need to buy some disposable trays such as aluminum foil pans or plastic containers. They should be a little larger than the intended size of your paper. You will also need to buy a pad of sketching paper (it needs to be nicer and thicker than copy paper). For colors, you will need to buy a set of cheap oil paints (not acrylic) in various colors, and a large container of mineral spirits to dilute the oil paints. Finally, you will need some small plastic phials or dropper bottles to store the paints in, paper towels, and some disposable eyedroppers.

Walden students making marbled paper at Timp Lodge

To do the paper, pour about an inch or two of water into the foil pans. Take the oil paints and squeeze out enough paint to fill the phial ¼ full, then add mineral spirits to make it ¾ full. Put on the lid and shake thoroughly. Make sure the paint is completely mixed. Take various paints and drop them onto the water; the oil-based paints are immiscible with the water and will spread out on a layer on top of the water. You can swirl the colors around or not to your taste. Keep adding different colors until you get a nice effect. Then take a piece of the sketching paper and fold it along one edge to make a handle and carefully lay the paper down on the oil layer, making sure not to submerge the paper into the water as you roll it across the top. The oil layer should transfer to the paper. Carefully lift the paper straight up and quickly place it face up on paper towels to dry. Once dry, you can photograph them in good light or scan them into a computer.

Set up to make marbled paper during my Intersession Science and Art class.

Natural fractal patterns created when the oil/mineral spirits separated from the water layer.

This project worked well at Timp Lodge and we made some good examples, although it is very messy. Students should wear aprons and gloves to do this. When we did this activity during Intersession class, we tried using the same paints several times as I had lots of paper left; you can lift out several prints from the same drops, each one getting lighter. At the end of class, a small amount of paint was still floating on top of the water. It had been sitting still for several minutes as the water stopped circulating. The paint separated into strange filamental structures that had formed into fractal patterns. So I lifted a few more prints, as seen here. Now I can scan them and use them for various multimedia projects and for examples of fractals in math classes. I didn’t anticipate that this activity had a math tie in, but there it is!

Marbled paper made during the Intersession class.

I still have enough paints and paper left to do this activity one more time, perhaps at the elementary school or at our back-to-school Science Showcase night, which will be on April 24. I think the elementary students will enjoy this very much, as did my high school students. I would recommend this as a science and art project for grades 2-12. You can talk about immiscibility, how oils and water don’t mix, and even demonstrate how detergents work. You can also let it sit and teach about fractal math patterns in nature.

With the beginning of the 2013-14 school year, I’m pleased to announce the start of a new program in my classes at Walden School of Liberal Arts. I call it the STEM-Arts Alliance, and it’s an attempt to bring artistic expression and creativity into my STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) courses.

Receiving the award from CenturyLink Foundation.

I have several reasons for doing this. First, I hope to broaden our students’ participation in upper-level science and technology courses. Given the size of our school, we could have more students taking courses such as chemistry, physics, astronomy, anatomy, and environmental science. We are a public charter school with a liberal arts emphasis, which means we get a high percentage of creative, passionate, out-of-the-box-thinking students. We need people like this to choose careers (or at least become more literate) in the sciences. My solution is to broaden the appeal of our science and technology courses by integrating the students’ strengths and interests. This is not to say I’m making my courses any less academic; it just means we’re using the arts as a continuing theme, by looking at the art of science, the science of art, and the history of both.

Second, I happen to love drawing and painting and rarely have time to do it. My artistic passion is somewhat satisfied by 3D animation and video production projects, but there’s just something about holding a paintbrush or an ink pen and seeing a project emerge from paper. I’ve been pulled in four different directions all my life; I seem to keep swinging between science, media design, history, and fine art. So I’m creating lesson plans and projects that incorporate all four of these areas, projects that are based around my own passions.

Award letter for the ING Unsung Heroes Award. It’s always a good day when you receive one of these!

Third, I hope to enhance the stories of science we’re telling by bringing my students’ artistic skills to bear on science topics. When I did some line drawings of Greek matter theorists (such as Thales, Parmenides, etc.) I found that they were frequently downloaded. Apparently, people are tired of finding only the few standard photos showing busts of Aristotle and his colleagues in some museum. Why not put myself (and my students) to work, creating new images in the cause of science education and fine art? I soon hope to complete the Greek Matter Theories videos I began four years ago, and I need more materials and images. Now I can do two things at once. I can draw illustrations of Aristotle or Democritus for the Greek videos while simultaneously teaching the chemistry of ink or paint pigments.

Fourth, our school is building up to become an International Baccalaureate (IB) school with a Middle Years Programme starting this year and growing to encompass 7-10 grades, with an additional Diploma Programme in our upper grades. The chemistry and technology courses are very much based on design projects and inquiry experiments while maintaining high academic standards. This is very much the model I have been working toward anyway, and my STEM-Arts Alliance should help my students transition into the IB chemistry and technology classes.

But to successfully implement my ideas, I needed funds and so I’ve been applying to every grant I can find. During this spring, I applied for five different programs, grants, or competitions, with three being due within two days of each other. True, it was made easier because all my proposals were similar, hoping that some would succeed. And they did! Two grants have come in. The first was $1250 from the CenturyLink Foundation. I received one of those large fake checks in May. I began purchasing equipment and supplies during the summer, including a GoPro camera, an audio recorder, a green screen, and a digitizing Bamboo tablet. These technologies will add to our ability to record video and audio, create digital images, and document what we’re doing in chemistry and astronomy in our two blog sites. We also purchased a new LEGO Mindstorms EV3 kit so we could start an afterschool robotics club. Here is a link to the CenturyLink Award: http://www.centurylink.com/static/Pages/AboutUs/Community/Foundation/teachers.html.

Receiving the award from Steve Platt of ING Foundation.

My second success was $2000 for the ING Unsung Heroes Award. They provide two such awards per state, and I thought I had a pretty good chance of winning one. I’ve purchased a new color laser printer (so much better than using the ink jet) as well as chemicals and supplies for the various lessons and projects we’ll be doing this year. I received a second large fake check from Steve Platt of ING this fall, as well as a nice plaque. I am still purchasing materials through this grant. Here is a link to the awards page in case you want to apply yourself: http://ing.us/about-ing/responsibility/childrens-education/ing-unsung-heroes.

So far my students have worked on a number of different projects in several different classes and at Timp Lodge. They’ve accomplished the following:
1. We set up a summer media design class that culminated in organizing the video clips and recording green screen narration for the SOFIA video I’m putting together.
2. We made tie-dye shirts at Timp Lodge.
3. We made marbled paper using dilute oil paints floated on water (also at Timp Lodge). 4. Students edited the SOFIA videos and built 3D objects from SOFIA’s interior in the middle school Creative Computing classes.
5. Students created iron-gall ink in chemistry and used it to draw pen and ink illustrations of science history concepts.
6. We started the robotics club after school, and students have built a rover capable of picking up small objects and moving them to new locations.
7. Students turned periodic properties of the elements into 3D models.
8. They built paper Christmas tree ornaments representing chemical elements.
9. Students created homemade watercolor pigments and used them to make paintings of science history.
10. They wrote and narrated podcast scripts on astrobiology topics.

I’ll report in more detail on each of these in future posts. It seems that we’re still just getting started, but in reality we’ve been very busy and very successful already. All projects have a fine arts component, a technology component (all paintings are scanned and cleaned up in Photoshop), and a history component. We are literally creating modern versions of old formulas used in making art for thousands of years. And it feels great to have all my passions pulling in the same direction.

Most of these activities have been in chemistry class. I am starting there as an initial run through, testing the recipes I’ve found online so that I can perfect the processes for future classes. The chemistry students have done exceptionally, and they’ve proven to have excellent art skills on top of learning chemistry and experimenting with different formulas. I hope to set up a dedicated Science and Art class during our Intersession that will incorporate all these activities and hopefully more besides. I’ve written another grant to the Moss Foundation just to get an electric kiln to do Raku pottery. So far I haven’t received word, but should soon. I might do a second class for making junk sculpture out of found objects. It will be a combination of materials science, design, and engineering.

I’m having a lot of fun researching and designing these projects, and I hope you’ll have fun reading about them and trying them out yourselves.

In this blog, I have been reporting on activities we did during the Mojave field study that have to do with chemistry and the elements, but since the purpose of the field study was to look at Earth analogs for possible Martian organisms, much of what we did is and will be recorded on my other blog site (www.spacedoutclass.wordpress.com). I will do much more with that site in late July as I prepare to teach astronomy this fall. At that point, the “wordpress” portion of the URL will be eliminated and the site will go “live” so to speak. I have many topics that need to be written about, including more on the Mojave experience.

But meanwhile, our last day in the Mojave was Friday, March 23. We prepared and launched a weather balloon, then each group presented their interim reports on the results of the study. I helped Mary Beth talk about the geology and soil chemistry analyses, and I also presented the 3D model of the test soil sample I worked on with Geoff Chu and his group (more on this in the other blog). I plan on having students at Walden School take the grayscale images and the actual altitude data and create 3D models and textures for each crust site which can be manipulated online.

I also took the opportunity to interview Dr. Rakesh Mogul, who was with CSU and is the organizer of this event, but is now moving to the NASA Office of Planetary Protection. He talked about the protocols that NASA uses to determine now clean a space probe needs to be so as not to contaminate a planet with our microorganisms and so as not to mess up our science results when looking for life.

Weather balloon after launch.

Once I had packed up my video equipment and other gear, I drove back to Utah, stopping in Las Vegas to drive through on the Strip. It has been about 15 years since I’ve actually done this, and it’s changed quite a bit – gotten larger, more crowded, and not very enticing for me, since I don’t gamble (I’ve taken too many operant conditioning classes in college to ever do that). It was a long drive back, but the trip was very much worth it. All told, I took about 15 hours of video, which will now take some time to capture and edit. I hope to do at least some of it (the interviews) this summer.

I wasn’t home for long (about four days) before I flew out to Indianapolis for the annual National Science Teachers Association conference. Much of what I did there was related to space science and astronomy (including attending a luncheon where an astronaut spoke; the awards ceremony for this year’s Mars Education Challenge, where I was asked to be the official photographer while Bill Nye introduced the winners and handed out the awards; and my own presentation on the SOFIA Airborne Astronomy Ambassadors program). However, I did attend a number of excellent sessions that were related to chemistry and the elements.

Above the clouds on the way to Indianapolis

On Thursday, March 29 I had to take the local buses from my motel out by the airport to downtown, and I was slightly late for the bus and had to wait 30 minutes for the next one, so I was a bit late getting into the conference. I went to the first session I could find in the booklet that was near where I was standing in the convention center and that sounded interested. It was a presentation on an activity that introduces the periodic table to students. The room was packed and I had to sit on the floor while the presenter talked. Something about him looked familiar, and suddenly I realized that the presenter was John Clark, a fellow SOFIA AAA. I had seen his photo on the discussion board.

John Clark and the SOFIA team from NASA Ames and the SETI Institute

His activity is done early on in a chemistry class, and involves handing 3 x 5 index cards to each student. They decorate their card, choose a name for their personal element and a symbol, then decide on properties of their element that describe their own personalities from a list, such as “science nerd” or “techy” or “drama king.” Other properties could be chosen from a list, such as number of electrons, etc. The students group themselves into “element” families according to the properties they selected, such as the colors they choose. From this they create a type of periodic table of their class, which the class as a whole has to discuss and justify. Not only does this get the students thinking about elements, properties, symbols, and other aspects of the periodic table, but it helps the teacher get to know the students better.

Cloud Chamber

I also attended a session by April Lanotte on how to build your own cloud chamber, which worked quite well. I’d tried to do this with a kit in the past, but could never get it to work. The secret is to not allow any air in or out as the internal air must be saturated with alcohol fumes and cooled with dry ice before stray cosmic rays can be seen or radiation from an alpha or beta source as vapor trails in the alcohol gas. She had built hers out of an aquarium that was carefully sealed. She also showed us amore sophisticated digital cosmic ray counter. She is an Einstein Fellow this year, and I also attended a number of sessions on that program and on the Presidential Award program.

Another session I attended was by L. Diener (I didn’t catch her first name) on the science of chocolate. Since my students and I just finished videotaping a tour of Amano Artisan Chocolates in our town (more on this later), I was interested in attending and she presented a simple activity about solubility and chocolate. Take a piece of chewing gum, such as candy coated Chiclets, and chew it for a few minutes until the flavor begins to decrease. At this point your saliva has dissolved all the sugars and flavors that are water soluble. Then take a Hersey’s kiss and chew it with the gum. Suddenly the remainder of the gum dissolves in your mouth, because the chocolate’s cocoa butter will dissolve the remaining fat soluble portions of the gum. But as soon as the chocolate has melted and dissolved in your mouth, the gum will start to re-solidify, although there will be less of it. It can be a big gross to feel this happening in your mouth, but it is a great way to talk about food science and how various substances do or don’t dissolve in each other.

David Black by the NSTA sign, Indianapolis Convention Center.

It was a busy conference. I walked through the dealers’ room and priced sensors and probeware for both the Vernier and Pasco systems, hoping that I’ll get some grant money to be able to use sensors with an iPad. I ran into old friends, such as Martin Horejsi (we were on the same flight going to Indianapolis, as he has to fly to Salt Lake from Missoula to pick up most connections) and Eric Brunsell. They were the only people from the Solar System Educators Program that I saw. But I did get to know some of my new associates, the SOFIA AAAs.

Downtown Indianapolis

I did get a chance to do something quite unusual. I was selected (how I don’t know) to sit in on a panel discussion on NSTA’s The Science Teacher journal and on the NSTA website. We were given a nice luncheon, then were asked a series of questions by Tyson Brown, whom I had known before back when I was doing the NASA Explorer Schools program. It was a fascinating discussion, and I put in a plug or two for Martin and Eric’s column (Science 2.0). There were several people in the back of the room writing notes, and one looked familiar. Once we opened up the journal and started going through it, I realized who he was – Steve Metz, the editor. I have decided that I really must submit an article as soon as possible. But my schedule has become so crazy that I’m not sure when that will be or which of several possible topics to write on. For our participation in the panel, we also received a $50 certificate to use in the NSTA bookstore.

Dealer room at the NSTA conference. Eric Brunsell is in the black shirt at the left of the photo.

Much of what I did and learned will be written (eventually) on the other blog site, as it is more related to astronomy than chemistry. There is, however, one other presentation I went to that I want to discuss here, and that was a lecture on ingenuity and creativity given by author David Macaulay. He is writing a book on how ingenuity has brought about marvelous ideas and inventions through the ages, and he basically walked us through his own creative process in developing the book. When I first started teaching in California, I taught world history for several years and used films based on his books Cathedral and Pyramid in my classes. They were very well done, and he has since created such books as The Way Things Work.

Between this lecture and the panel discussion luncheon, I did a lot of thinking while waiting for the bus on Sunday morning (only to find it doesn’t run on Sundays, so the motel’s shuttle van driver took me downtown instead). But while waiting, I thought of several ideas for books and series of books I could write for NSTA Press, such as how to use authentic science data in the classroom. I’m doing more of this all the time, and many of the sessions I chose to attend were based on real data analysis. I realize that in some ways what I am doing is unique, since I blend science and computer graphics/3D animation technologies. Yet the one session I attended Sunday morning was all about this – the art of science, and Randy Landsberg of the U. of Chicago showed examples of collaborations between artists, the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, and the Adler Planeterium, including an incredible animation taking the viewer to the edge of the universe and another showing cosmic ray showers from the Pierre Auger data. I scribbled notes as fast as I could, and I still need to check up on all the possibilities. It was invigorating to see that others are pushing the edge and blurring distinctions between art and science, which is one of my goals as well.

It was an incredible conference. I was very involved, learned much, brought back many ideas, and made good connections.